When, in August, Warner Bros. announced that Ben Affleck will play Batman in the upcoming sequel to Man of Steel, a chorus of groans resonated across the Twitterverse. Affleck already tried his hand at superhero flicks in 2003's atrocious Daredevil, and seems to lack the depth required by the Cape and Cowl.

He does. Yet Affleck's casting as the Dark Knight is actually a blessing in disguise, because his very implausibility as Batman will mitigate the character's fascist subtext, which recent films have embraced.

Batman has always been a bit fascist, as are all superheroes to some extent--their raison d'etre, after all, is fighting evil, not ameliorating dysfunction. As Noah Brand writes in "The Dark Knight Rises Is a Pro-Fascist Movie":

"These stories, which I have grown up on and still love, are predicated on creating a situation of such exaggerated threat that fascist solutions, i.e. strongmen acting outside due process to restore order by violent force, become not only plausible but desirable. To put it another way, citizens of Metropolis might be uncomfortable with having a nearly-omnipotent alien living in their city, answerable to no authority but himself, but when a week can't go by without a giant robot trying to level the city, you'll accept the alien as preferable to the robots."

However, as Brand goes on to note, artists in the superhero genre can choose to embrace or oppose this underlying tendency toward glorified social violence. The original Batman TV series, for instance, uses camp to turn the character's "crime fighting" into one long, self-referential joke, while directors Tim Burton (Batman, Batman Returns) and Joel Schumacher (Batman Forever, Batman and Robin) apply surrealism and extravagance to create an ironic distance between the viewer and the film. This distance prevents viewers from mistaking the extraordinary situations and strongman-solutions they're watching as accurate depictions of the real world. An Affleck Batman, under the direction of perpetual adolescent Zack Snyder, could similarly diffuse Batman's authoritarian worldview via unbelievability.

Of course, Nolan's formula only works if the audience can take it seriously. This is why Affleck is such a serendipitous choice for Batman. In conjunction with director Zack Snyder's penchant for style over substance, Affleck's Batman is likely to be shallow and wooden enough to remind audiences that they're watching escapist fiction, not stylized reality.

When we disbelieve in Batman's moral universe, on the other hand, we are more able to adopt a critical stance toward government, society, and force. This is the redeeming quality of an Affleck Batman: his very implausibility will help to undermine Batman's authoritarian mythology. Here in the real world, there's too much at stake for us to be seduced by fascist tropes clothed in cinematic "realism."

We need a Batman we cannot believe in — and Affleck will deliver precisely that.